Joe College: A Novel by Tom Perrotta Page B

image of his parents, it was easy to forget what attractive people they were—tanned, youthful, athletic-looking—so unlike their son that Max frequently had to insist to people who had just met Gail and Howard that he was not,
in fact, adopted. The Friedlins were probably only a couple of years younger than my parents, but they seemed to belong to a different generation. You got the feeling that they would rather be caught dead than listening to Henry Mancini or the Hundred and One Strings on the car stereo, and that, under the right circumstances, they could probably tell you some pretty interesting stories involving hot tubs and controlled substances.
    “Just like Max,” his father echoed in a less affectionate voice, stroking his salt-and-pepper beard and impatiently flipping through a week-old Yale Daily he’d found on the coffee table. He was sporting a stylishly cut silvery blue suit that looked like it might have been pilfered from the set of Miami Vice. Like Don Johnson, Mr. Friedlin wore the suit over an expensive-looking black T-shirt, a casual touch I found quite appealing.
    Ted, Sang, and I nodded in unison, each of us muttering something to the effect that it was indeed just like Max. All three of us had dressed for dinner, Sang and Ted in khakis, blue blazers, and striped ties, with Sang opting to spice up the uniform with a pair of red Converse high-tops. I myself was outfitted in a daringly eclectic ensemble—skinny black leather New Wave tie courtesy of Hank Yamashita, tan corduroy sport coat, blue Dickey work pants, and my radioactive cowboy boots—that I was beginning to suspect added up to less than the sum of its parts. We were sitting next to each other on the couch, one to a cushion in descending order of size—Ted, Sang, me—like brothers posing for a portrait.
    “He better get here soon,” Howard Friedlin muttered. “The reservations are for seven o’clock.”
    “We don’t have to get there exactly at seven,” his wife reminded him. “It’s not like we’re going to lose the table.”
    “That’s not the point.” Mr. Friedlin had tossed aside the Daily and turned his attention to a copy of Aurora that Nancy must have picked up from the freebie table outside the dining hall. Aurora was a feminist journal specializing in impassioned critiques of the patriarchy and celebratory, sometimes astonishingly explicit poems about lesbian sex, not to mention the occasional frank portrait of
sullen, short-haired women with no shirts and hairy armpits. I read it avidly, if furtively, with confused feelings of shame and arousal, but Mr. Friedlin seemed unruffled by what he found there. “The point is, we’ve got a roomful of hungry males to feed. Right, guys?”
    Sang and I made noncommittal gestures meant to suggest that we could wait, but Ted nodded in emphatic agreement.
    “I’m starving,” he said, rubbing his stomach tenderly, as though it were the head of a sick dog. “I had to work right through lunch to finish my lab report.”
    “See?” said Mr. Friedlin.
    His wife pretended not to hear. Seconds earlier, the Harkness carillon had clanged into action, the gigantic bells ringing out a slow motion, barely recognizable version of Bob Seger’s “Night Moves.” As if summoned by the music, Mrs. Friedlin stood up and drifted over to the window overlooking the courtyard. She was wearing tailored black pants and an aquamarine silk blouse that interacted with the light in all sorts of strange and shimmery ways. Her body was lithe and girlish from all that tennis; from my angle, at least, you would not have pegged her as the mother of a college-aged son. With exasperation and a certain degree of scorn, Max had once described to me some of her elaborate beauty regimens—the manicures and pedicures, the leg and lip and bikini waxes, the clay masks and diet pills, the massages and hundred-dollar haircuts, the long hours she put in scouring fashion magazines. her brow knitted as though